In this paper we compare and contrast the view on poverty of lay people, who are affected by the policies, with that of academics and policy-makers. Drawing from fieldwork in a village in Kerala, India, and applying the 'participatory numbers' approach, we devise a 'local method' to identify...

Learning is assumed to be a fundamental means through which an individual can improve her life, particularly in the context of moving out of poverty. There is no prescribed methodology for evaluation of improvement to or deterioration of quality of life related to learning, beyond aggregated...

This article applies the concept of poverty as insufficiency of basic capabilities in measuring living conditions of residents of a favela (shantytown) in Rio de Janeiro, the Vidigal favela. For this purpose, we develop a methodology to operationalize the capability approach. Our choice of this...

The Human Development Index, which is multidimensional by construction, is criticized on the ground that it is insensitive to any form of inequality across persons. Inequality in the multidimensional context can take two distinct forms. The first pertains to the spread of the distribution across...